Dr Amber Murrey

Small Group Project 2024-25

Provocations Between Black and African Geographies--New Directions for Decolonial and Anti-Racist Thought

With Patricia Daley

Our collaborative seeks to transcend the conventional separation of Black Geographies from African Geographies, responding to the urgent call to move beyond this bifurcation to address the persistent coloniality within the study of African societies. Acknowledging the potential pitfalls of selective visibility within the global academic landscape, our collaborations aim to foster a nuanced dialogue between these distinct schools of thought and to centre the contributions of Black geographers. We will bring together 15 leading scholars working in these areas for an intense 1.5-day workshop at the University of Oxford, resulting in a journal Special Issue and new knowledges.

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Cohort

Biography

Amber Murrey is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford, having previously held academic positions at the American University in Cairo, Clark University in Massachusetts and Jimma University in Ethiopia. Prior to this, she was the Dissertation Write-Up Fellowship in African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College.

Amber is a decolonial political geographer, ethnographer and educator. Her research on resistance and social change in Africa is empirically grounded and integrates the political geographies of environmental and socio-political struggles with decolonial theory and resistance studies. For the last decade, her work has considered the connections between resource extraction (particularly crude oil), social change and the knowledge-development nexus in contemporary African societies. She has published more than a dozen chapters, articles and reviews, some of which have featured in the pages of Annals of American Geographers, Political Geography, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Third World Quarterly, Review of African Political Economy and more. She is the editor of 'A Certain Amount of Madness': The Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara (2018).

Biographical details correct as of 09.07.25

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